Doing Business in Xi’s New Era

Strategic Communications

October 26, 2017

The Communist Party of China (CPC/Party) has just concluded the first session of its 19th Party Congress. President Xi Jinping, Secretary General of the CPC, emerged from the week-long event as the nation’s most powerful leader since its opening to the outside world in the 1970s. Xi strengthened his political position by elevating himself to a status only previously held by Mao Zedong, stacking the Party’s highest-level executive bodies with his allies, and enshrining his own eponymous philosophy in the country’s constitution as a guiding vision for a new third era in the century-long history of the CPC.

This new era starts now and will run until 2049 when the Party will celebrate the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Xi’s new guiding vision, named ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’, will guide all aspects of China’s development and policy-making over the coming decades. Whether foreign businesses like it or not, they should be paying attention as they will need to get to grips with its major thrusts and tenets.

In this report, FTI Consulting aims to explain Xi Jinping’s Thought and its likely implications for China’s economy, foreign business and Chinese outbound investment.